Hypercontrast

Language learners may also be found to have difficulties with a newly acquired contrast and substitute the wrong member of the phonemic pair. Eckman et al. call this phenomenon ‘hypercontrast’ and state that it results from over-generalization or hypercorrection. It is suggested that hypercontrasts are motivated by speakers’ awareness of past errors they have made via L1 interference. For example, Spanish speakers have difficulties in acquiring the English /d/ vs. /ð/ contrast, as they are the allophones of a single phoneme in their L1. Once they acquire the contrast, however, they may produce incorrect [d] for correct [ð] intervocalically. Another example would be the following: a newly learned item with a /d/ target in initial position, which is in accordance with the L1 pattern, may be produced incorrectly as [ð].